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Richard Esguerra

Richard wielded a keyboard as an EFF Activist for four years, then indulged in his love of video games with the fine folks of Humble Bundle. After a year, he returned to EFF to help raise funds for a better digital future. Richard has yet to retrieve the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot, and he still takes lots of pictures of his cat.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a long history of promoting commercial competition and consumer protection. Clearly recognizing that many of the trickiest issues facing consumers today are digital, the Commission has made the commendable decision of hiring Princeton professor of computer science and public affairs (and former EFF board member) Ed Felten as its first Chief Technologist.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today on yet another major Facebook privacy blunder. Despite Facebook's various polices and promises about users' privacy when using apps, apps have been feeding Facebook users' information to advertisers and Internet tracking companies regardless of the individual user's Facebook privacy settings.

Senator Patrick Leahy yesterday introduced the "Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act" (COICA). This flawed bill would allow the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to break the Internet one domain at a time — by requiring domain registrars/registries, ISPs, DNS providers, and others to block Internet users from reaching certain websites. The bill would also create two Internet blacklists.

When it comes to copyright enforcement and the government, EFF frequently warns that giving government agents a reason to censor, search, seize, and indict must be taken very seriously. Without safeguards and a thorough accounting of the consequences, laws and policies targeting so-called "pirates" can be used to pry away human rights and undermine fundamental elements of democracy and freedom.

Copyright trolls are nothing new, and Righthaven is just the latest group of lawyers to try to turn copyright litigation into a business model. What these lawyers have in common is that they seek to take advantage of copyright's draconian damages in order to bully Internet users into forking over money.

Music lovers take note: the classical music archive Musopen needs your help to liberate some classic symphonies from copyright entanglement. Museopen is looking to solve a difficult problem: while symphonies written by Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky are in the public domain, many modern arrangements and sound recordings of those works are copyrighted.

Next time you fly Virgin America, you just might see one of EFF's new PSAs as part of your onboard entertainment. Earlier this year, EFF worked with Bucknell University Professor Eric Faden (of A Fair(y) Use Tale fame) to create these two video PSAs about important, cutting-edge digital rights issues!

As we now know, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — allegedly conceived to reduce the flow of fake physical goods across borders — could cut people off of the Internet, turn Internet intermediaries into copyright cops, and create a global framework that puts severe restrictions on innovation.

The file-sharing public faces yet another wave of predatory litigation, this time from the so-called US Copyright Group ("USCG"), which is suing BitTorrent users on behalf of various independent filmmakers.